TRUE RED AND BLUE, AFTER ALL? Since the November election, there have been a bunch of deep-think articles in various papers and magazines saying that the whole Red State / Blue State cultural divide really doesn’t exist, and the national political trends of the past 20 years or so are not a function of differing ideologies. I would guess that most of those articles have been written by Blue state people and have appeared in publications sited in Blue states. It’s a Blue State process: put forth an idea about a cultural divide within the nation, then try to criticize and debunk it. Blue state people value unity and togetherness, so they will obviously revolt against their own perceptions of disunity. That’s just what they do.

I too value the notion of community, but to be honest, I think that the blue versus red state thing is not just an illusion. There was an interesting affirmation of this in an article in the May, 2005 Atlantic Monthly (a blue state magazine that has already published a number of “no real divide” articles). A Frenchman named Bernard-Henri Levy took a trip across America in the Alexis de Tocqueville tradition and wrote about it (“In the Footsteps of Tocqueville”, the article is called). Recall that Tocuqeville toured America in the early 1800s and wrote a famous book with his reflections on American politics and culture. Mr. Levy, as a modern Tocqueville, seems to agree that there is something going on out in Wyoming, Idaho, Kansas, Arkansas and the like. In the coastal cities, where the Democrats can still win elections, it was hard for Mr. Levy to get anyone to say why they consider themselves a Democrat. But in the red states, people had a whole lot of reasons for being Republicans. And the reasons sound awfully familiar: religion, anti-elitism, family values. Mr. Levy seems to think that the heartland is indeed voting against its economic interests and in favor of an ideology based on “the way we like it out here”.

Yea, I thought so. There is a real need for discussion and interaction across the political / cultural / geographic divide here in America. The folk out in Indiana and Oklahoma need to see that gay marriage isn’t the end of the world, and the folk in New York and California need to think about how things play in Peoria. Whoops, blue state there (if only because of the Chicago area). OK, then how things play in Pocatello and Petersburg and Plano. Mr. Levy points out that Europe has suffered the effects of passionate ideology more than once over its long history, while the U.S. really hasn’t (other than perhaps the Civil War). He ends the article on a note of irony: a votre sante, i.e. good luck in dealing with it all, hope you do better than we did, although I rather doubt it . . . . .